1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to distribution content creating apparatuses and, more specifically, to a distribution content creating apparatus for creating a video or music content which is provided with use conditions.
2. Description of the Background Art
In recent years, content distribution services have become available for distributing video or music contents to terminals such as personal computers and portable phones. In such a content distribution service, a content (content body) is not simply distributed by itself. In order to prevent an illegal copy of the content body, the content body is provided with conditions restricting the use of the content body, thereby forming a content for distribution (distribution content). In consideration of the foreseeable expansion of the content distribution service, it is urgently required to develop distribution content creating apparatuses which are capable of efficiently creating various distribution contents.
A conventional distribution content creating apparatus creates a distribution content according to the following procedure. That is, the conventional apparatus stores content bodies, and edits management data for the respective content bodies. Then, the generated management data is provided to the content body, and the resulting content is the distribution content, which is handled as a package.
The management data that is edited by the conventional apparatus includes data indicating conditions for the use of the content body at destination terminals, such as “playable only when a fee is paid”, and “playable within a certain period”. In the conventional apparatus, such management data is generated and provided to the respective content bodies.
The distribution content that is created in the above-described manner is temporarily stored in the distribution content creating apparatus, and is then forwarded to a distributing apparatus. The distributing apparatus distributes the forwarded distribution content to a terminal through a network. The terminal receives the distribution content, and replays the content body according to the management data which is provided to the content.
As described above, the conventional distribution content creating apparatus creates a distribution content including a content body which is provided with conditions restricting the use of the content body at the terminals. Therefore, for example, it is possible to distribute a promotion distribution content that is playable for free only within a predetermined period and a full-package distribution content that is playable upon payment of a fee.
In the conventional distribution content creating apparatus, one piece of management data is provided for each content body. Therefore, replay restriction and billing can be disadvantageously made only by the unit of the content body. If a distribution content such as one that is provided with conditions that are effective only to part of the content body can be created, the distribution content will be usable for various purposes which have not been achievable so far, hopefully leading to a boost in sales of contents through distribution.
Another disadvantage of the conventional apparatus is that different distribution contents have to be created for different purposes for the same content body, and stored in the apparatus. For example, a promotion distribution content and a full-package distribution content have to be created and stored for the same content body. Therefore, the same content body is redundantly stored, thereby wasting a large amount of storage. At the terminal side, if the user desires to try the content first before purchase, the user has to first receive the promotion distribution content, and then further receive the full-package distribution content. This means that the user has to redundantly receive the same content body, thereby wasting time and communications cost.